


The Mark

by mortalitasi



Series: into the forest [6]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, General, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 14:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathaniel's been in the business of losing things - people, homes, friends - for a very long time. He's not sure how much longer he can keep it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mark

He doesn’t understand why she always wears gloves until the day she pulls them off in front of him.

He’d asked her to. Gently, of course, even though the Warden-Commander isn’t in the business of needing any sort of gentility, but he supposes it’s a luxury he can afford her—he’s probably the only one treating her like this.

She appreciates it, he knows, but is too proud to admit it. He’d only realized he’s never seen her without her gloves the first night they spend together. She works around them awkwardly, like she doesn’t want to remove them but knows he’s aware of them. Her failure to mention them is what tips him off. He’s sitting by her on the edge of the bed with tunic loosened and armor discarded when he puts the question forward.

A few emotions chase each other across her face in quick succession. Anxiety, defeat, a little bit of anger. At herself, he wagers. She’s too critical of her own actions. It’s part of why she’s such a good leader.

Lyna doesn’t say anything when she looks up at him for one last time before slowly peeling the hunting glove from her right hand first. When that’s done, she moves onto the left, and finishes the job even when she hears him catch his breath in surprise. She still hasn’t lifted her eyes again when she curls her fingers around her knees, bare and on display.

Nathaniel has seen the corruption in men before—the soldier outside of the silverite mines, sometimes the few survivors of darkspawn raids in the country, the straggling, half-mad wounded casualties left behind whenever a caravan is attacked; standing next to one tainted as a Grey Warden is a feeling he can’t describe in words. There’s a pull to it, like an undefined, distant sound you have to strain to notice, but you’re never quite able to hear it fully, loudly. You don’t know whether you want to. The song feels dangerous, and it is attractive. You sometimes sleep at night hoping to know its phrases the next time you awaken.

It’d been difficult being told that that was the calling all darkspawn answered to. It’d been difficult realizing just what it meant to be a Grey Warden. What it meant for any hopes he’d had of restoring the Howe line, or of any dreams about old age in some rambling Rivaini shack on a windblown coast. The taint would be his end, like it has been for generations of Wardens before him. But even now, it seems a thing of the far-off future—a dark possibility, a looming danger. Nothing close or immediate.

Looking at what’s beneath the Warden-Commander’s gloves erases all of that certainty. What’s there is not malformed, as he expected it to be. She is not a creature prone to many vanities, but she is confident. He’d guessed from the start that the gloves were there to hide something. He’d just not guessed it would be  _this_.

Her hands are lovely. Slender. Shaped by archer’s discipline. And from the wrist downward, they look ruined.

The flesh is pale and mottled in turns, and the veins blackened like fired coal—the skin on her palms is the color of obsidian, shot through with the telltale bluish sheen of the taint, gleaming with the shine of blood newly-spilt. He has to touch them to make sure they aren’t covered in it—blood—and when he turns them palm-up on his own larger hands, he is shocked to discover they’re warm. Very warm. Almost feverish. Her fingers twitch at the contact, moving against the cage of his palm.

The nails of each hand are slightly blue, as though she’s come in from a long day out in the cold, and he knows with an icy surety that it is the sign of whatever desiccation this is is spreading.

“Does it hurt?”

She shakes her head, staring down at her own hands as though it’s the first she’s ever seen of them. “They did the first few days, but… now I don’t feel almost anything. Not heat, nor cold. Not even pain.”

His grasp tightens, just slightly. “How did it happen?”

“After Fort Drakon, during the siege,” she says quietly. She moves her fingers, turns a hand over to look at the veins spidering like dark webs on the underside of her wrist. “Something knocked my bow away. I took up a sword while the Archdemon was down and just—I felt it go through the thing’s skull. It was like I’d locked myself in a furnace. Everything burned. I woke up in the palace, four days after it all.”

He can’t imagine it, something like slaying an Archdemon. He also can’t imagine that he’d once hoped to kill this woman. She’d have strung him out on the parapets by his smalls. She very nearly did, if he remembers her frustration with him correctly. He’s happy they’re past that. So far past it, in fact, that they can hold hands like this and sit on a bed together without fumbling for words.

“They were like this when I came to,” Lyna goes on. “The healers said there was nothing to be done. They’d seen nothing like it before. Unsurprising.”

“But you have an idea of what caused it.”

She raises a brow at him. “I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to,” he tells her with a small smile.

“Very well. You’ve caught me,” she says, laughing. “I believe the passing of the Archdemon’s… soul is what advanced the state of my hands. It just managed to pass through them before—leaving.”

They’ve spoken of that before, of the thing Lyna calls the Dark Ritual. It’s another one of those events Nathaniel has a hard time imagining, though he doesn’t doubt it happened. The Commander being alive is proof enough. She is the only Warden in all of history to have slain an Archdemon and lived to tell the tale. Joining the Wardens explained to him why. He suspects it’s made her an oddity, and, for some, a liability. Questions are not valued in the Grey Order. You’re told what to do and you do it, inquiries excluded. It’s usually better not to ask, but secrets kill, or, in this case, let you  _survive_.

After such a long legacy of death, it must be almost unbelievable for a Warden to somehow surpass the very defining feature of their brotherhood and come away without paying the ultimate price all members of the Grey are expected to surrender. To some, it may even seem a betrayal. A harbinger of change. People are frightened of change. Nathaniel doesn’t think the Wardens are any different—perhaps they are worse than most. Tradition is all they know. It has to be. Straying from it means something less than absolute devotion, and that sometimes also means lack of loyalty. Of faith. Absence of those often leads to destruction.

He has no illusions about why Weisshaupt has taken a pointed interest to every one of the Commander’s actions, nor about why they’ve sent a treasurer here to oversee all of any financial maneuverings to be done in and by the Keep. They’re content to stay put… for now. He notices how Mistress Woolsey’s eyes follow the Commander around the common room whenever she’s going about her work, like no one sharp enough can notice it’s happening. He’s brought it to Lyna’s attention before.

“What will happen will happen,” she said and shrugged, unclasping her gauntlet and setting it aside. “There’s no point in agonizing over it. I still have work to do. They won’t try anything before the darkspawn threat in Amaranthine is dealt with.”

“They’re only letting you have free rein with the place because they don’t want to do it themselves,” he’d replied. He’d been frustrated on her behalf, annoyed with her cool acceptance of everything.

“That may be so,” she’d agreed and started on the laces of her leather vambrace. “But it is something that needs to be done. Weisshaupt or no Weisshaupt, the Architect and this—Mother, they are true dangers, and they must be eliminated before we’re to do any politicking.”

“I hope the First Warden sees it that way,” he had mumbled, trying not to look too long when she’d shrugged out of the first layer of her leathers.

“He does.”

And that had been that. She doesn’t seem as confident now, staring down at her hands, closing and opening them as though she’s expecting them to stop working any minute.

“I don’t think I have much time left,” she says in a low voice, and for a moment his heart  _stops_  before stumbling over itself and starting up again, unsteady and too fast.

“What?” he asks dumbly and clasps his hands closer over hers.

“When I was first recruited I was told only senior Wardens understood the Archdemon’s call,” she explains, keeping her tone methodical and controlled. “And it was alright, for a time. But in the Deep Roads—in my dreams… I could hear him speaking. I knew what he wanted the darkspawn to do. He… he  _saw_ me.”

“You’re young yet,” he says and it doesn’t sound convincing even to him. She’s always been the most alert of their group, able to sense darkspawn the furthest away out of any of them, but he’d thought that was experience more than anything else, not because of this. Never this.

Nathaniel came back to Ferelden to find he’d lost everything that ever meant something to him. Delilah moved on and past their father’s treasons without him, and he doesn’t begrudge her for it, but it’d left him behind. He hadn’t been so alone since the beginning of his stay in the Marches. Ferelden hadn’t felt like home when he returned and despite it all he’d found purpose again. She’d given that to him. Hearing that he may live to see her  _go_ —it’s nothing short of a nightmare made reality. Maker, please. He’s never asked for anything because he’s been taught that the things he wants are things he must work for, but he is no god to rule over life and death. For the first time in his life he wishes he were.

“I think it’s because of the eluvian,” Lyna murmurs, averting her eyes. “The taint in it was so  _strong._ Even the Keeper’s magic was only just delaying it. Tamlen had the brunt of it, and he—”

She stops talking abruptly and her sentence trails off into silence. He feels her hands tense.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she begins. “That’s in the past. There are certain advantages to my condition. I’m not going anywhere till the Architect is dead, or till I’m sure he will be.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he says, voice husky with emotion. “You’ll be around for many more years to come.”

She smiles at him again but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I wanted you to know before you invested anything in me. I’m on borrowed time, Nathaniel. It might not be best for us to… go further.”

He cups her face in his hands, feeling the smooth skin of her cheeks over his knuckles, and kisses her. It isn’t like their first. That one was too rough and urgent to be called the beginning of anything. But this feels right. She almost jolts back and out of it but instead she stops and just—lets go. When they part he brushes the hair from her shoulders and looks at her, tilting his head down to press his brow to hers. She opens her eyes slowly, as though she’s emerging from the slow lull of a good sleep. The expression on her face tempers the edges of the grief that had been tearing at him moments earlier.

“Was that an answer enough?” he asks and she nods.

“You’re mad,” she says though there’s no mistaking the affection in it.

“Not any more than you,” Nathaniel replies, linking his arms around her waist. “Four hundred years of history and no way to counteract the taint? I don’t believe it.”

“There have been rumors,” she admits and shrugs. “In fact—I’ll take you with me the next time we follow up on Soldier’s Peak.”

That confuses him. “Soldier’s Peak? Isn’t that the old Warden fortress in the Frostbacks? Above the mining tunnels?”

“Impressive, Howe,” Lyna compliments. “You know your geography.”

“I was a rotten pupil,” he replies, remembering the days when tutors chasing him down with dusty tomes of Fereldan antiquity were the height of his worries. “But I retained some things. What could you possibly want at Soldier’s Peak?”

She sits up and gives him one of her own kisses this time, and it’s more than adequate in driving him to distraction. An abandoned keep is the furthest thing from his mind when she turns around and wiggles her shoulders to indicate the cords at the back of her tunic still need to be undone.

“I’ll tell you later,” she assures him. “If I recall correctly, however, we were quite busy before getting sidetracked.”

He clears his throat, suddenly feeling bashful. “We were, weren’t we?”

She gazes at him over her shoulder, looking for all intents and purposes incredibly innocent, but he knows she enjoys making him squirm. Something about appearances and them not matching personalities, or being happy about having some fun from time to time—whichever it is, she laughs under her breath when he has to take a minute before tackling the knots because of the heat rising to this face.

“With all due respect, Commander,” he bites out, “be quiet.”

Nathaniel blinks in surprise when she faces him, tunic slipping down over her arms. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

Whether he does or not isn’t a subject to be discussed in proper circles (a good thing he’s never really been concerned with what’s proper, then). He scarcely has the time to balance himself correctly, securely, before she launches herself at him and they go tumbling back together on the mattress like children locked in a wrestling match.

She doesn’t so much as touch the gloves until well into the next morning. 


End file.
